(Yet another) Canada Weather App

I check the weather about fifty times a day. Okay, not really, but between seeing where it’s snowing the most and checking to see if it will be raining too hard to dig holes (my job), I check it a lot, and usually in five or six locations. I’ve always liked Environment Canada’s forecasts, but always found it hard to figure out which location I should be using, since there’s no good map of the cities where forecasts are issued for. Current apps on Google Play all have issues that make them annoying to use, and are usually just a little too complicated for their own good.

this realization coincided with three days of watching trucks at work for 12 hours a day, so I wrote a better (maybe just simpler) one. after building the database of forecast locations using the javascript on Environment Canada’s own website (parsed with a simple java program), I used Google’s HTTP geocoding API to get lat/lons for the cities, filling in a few by hand. the rest was just minor parsing of Environment Canada’s RSS feed, with a little help from the open-source Canadian weather app EmWeather around turning text into weather icons. after all of this, I realized Environment Canada puts out an XML forecast format, although I quite like the simplicity of the RSS feed.